Tea partiers toiled mightily to nominate Ken Buck as the Republican candidate to run against Sen. Michael Bennet, who is a direct descendant of a Mayflower passenger, grandson of an economic adviser to Franklin Roosevelt and son of an official in the Carter and Clinton administrations. He attended tony St. Alban's school in Washington, D.C., and Yale Law School. Buck is a Princetonian.

But to erase the stain of privilege, Buck stresses that his family, although hardly poor, was frugal - "No, you won't get a Happy Meal, you'll get a burger." And he worked in a Princeton cafeteria and later as a truck driver, ranch hand and janitor, so there.

A large man with close-cropped gray hair, he was a college football player talented enough to get a tryout as a punter with the New York Giants. Having, perhaps, an unslaked appetite for blocking and tackling, he became, after years in business, a prosecutor in Weld County, north of Denver. Explaining his Senate candidacy, he says: "I was in law enforcement for a long time and had seen how politicians had screwed up, so I decided I couldn't do worse and might do better."

Colorado Republicans have nominated a weak candidate for governor, and former Republican Rep. Tom Tancredo, an immigration obsessive who is running for governor as an independent, will siphon away some Republican votes. So Republicans assume that Democrats, assured of holding the governorship, will direct more money to Bennet. Republicans, however, hope Tancredo will pull to the polls some disaffected conservative voters who otherwise might not show up, and who also will vote for Buck.

Bennet, formerly superintendent of Denver's schools, was appointed to the Senate after Barack Obama nominated Sen. Ken Salazar to be secretary of the interior. He is one of six current appointed senators. The other five are Roland Burris, D-Ill., who replaced Obama; Edward Kaufman, D-Del., who replaced Joe Biden; Kirsten Gillibrand, D-N.Y., who replaced Hillary Clinton; George LeMieux, R-Fla., who replaced Mel Martinez, who resigned; and Carte Goodwin, D-W.Va., who replaced the late Robert Byrd. A seventh senator, Lisa Murkowski, the Alaska Republican, was appointed in 2002 (by the then-governor, her father). She was elected to a full term in 2004, but narrowly lost last week's Republican primary.

Joe Miller, who defeated Murkowski, is another populist with an elite pedigree. Before earning a law degree at Yale, he was a West Pointer and a decorated (Bronze Star) Gulf War combat veteran. He is a former judge and a member of the Federalist Society of conservative lawyers. He, like Buck, is one of seven Republicans who won Senate nominations by defeating candidates favored by national party leaders. The other five are Marco Rubio in Florida, Rand Paul in Kentucky, Sharron Angle in Nevada, Mike Lee in Utah and Linda McMahon in Connecticut.

Buck identifies with candidates such as Rubio, Paul and Pat Toomey (former congressman, now Republican Senate nominee in Pennsylvania). An admirer of Rep. Paul Ryan, R-Wis., Buck would start over on health care reform, stressing health savings accounts, medical malpractice tort reform and portability of insurance coverage.

Colorado is a red state that has recently turned purple and that Democrats still hope to make blue. Doing so would have national implications because until recently the Republican strategy in presidential elections was to hold the South and the Mountain West and spend half the gross domestic product to carry Ohio. In the last decade, however, parts of the Mountain West, and especially Colorado, have become competitive. Colorado's governor, both senators and five of seven U.S. representatives are Democrats, and Obama carried the state with 53.66 percent.

Coloradans, Buck says, now are "50-50 about Obama" but "80-20 against Washington." His one campaign stumble may actually have helped him. It occurred after an event where someone questioned whether Obama is an American citizen. Speaking within range of a tape recorder belonging to a Democratic worker who was following Buck around, Buck laughingly said to someone, "Will you tell those dumbasses at the tea party to stop asking questions about birth certificates while I'm on the camera?"

Buck says his language was inappropriate, but many people disagree. Tea party leaders - that is not quite an oxymoron - know that Obama's performance, not his provenance, is the point.

GEORGE WILL writes for The Washington Post. E-mail: georgewill@washpost.

When last spring the Pew Global Attitudes Project asked residents of Islamic countries what they thought about Obama, he got good marks when it came to such matters as climate change. But when the question was the Israeli-Palestinian conflict, the numbers not only declined in Indonesia and Turkey, they nearly went through the floor in the three Arab countries polled. In Jordan, 84 percent disapproved of the way Obama was handling the conflict. In Egypt, the figure was 88 percent and in Lebanon it was 90 percent.

For Obama, the figures must be disheartening. They suggest that his attempt to woo the Arab world, to convince it that America can be an honest broker, has dismally failed. The extent of this failure is most stark in Lebanon. There, 100 percent of Shiite respondents - in other words, Hezbollah and others - have no faith in Obama and his good intentions. This may be a setback for Obama, but it is paradoxically a success for American values.

What the Arab world seems to appreciate is that America will never agree to what the Arab world most wants - an Islamic state where a Jewish one now exists. This reasonable conclusion is based on what has long been American policy - not what the State Department wanted but what the American people supported. America has always liked the idea of Israel. The Arab world, for totally understandable reasons, has always hated it. Nothing has changed.

A fundamental document in this area - a once-secret CIA analysis from 1947 - was unearthed (to my knowledge) by Thomas W. Lippman and reported in the winter 2007 issue of the Middle East Journal. The CIA argued that creation of Israel was not in America's interests and that therefore Washington ought to be opposed. This was no different than what later diplomats and military men (most recently, David Petraeus) have argued and it is correct. Supporting Israel hurts America in the Islamic - particularly the Arab - world and, given the importance of Middle Eastern oil, makes no practical sense.

The CIA argued that the Arab-Israeli conflict would widen to become an Israeli-Islamic conflict - another bull's-eye for what was then an infant intelligence service. That process was already under way, which is why some non-Arabs (Bosnian Muslims, for instance) fought the creation of Israel, and has only intensified as radical Islam, laced with healthy doses of anti-Semitism, has gotten even stronger.

But where the CIA went wrong - and not, alas, for the last time - was in predicting that the Arabs would defeat Israel and that the state would not survive. The CIA was sure of the outcome, what a later CIA figure might have called a "slam dunk."

What neither the CIA nor, for that matter, the anti-Israel State Department recognized in the late 1940s is that America's interests are not always measurably pragmatic - metrics, in the jargon of our day. Sometimes, our interests reflect our national ethic, an affinity for other democracies, sympathy for the underdog. These, too, are in America's interests and they may be modified, but not abandoned, for the sake of mere metrics.

This is why Obama's overture to the Arab world, clumsily executed, was never going to succeed. America can please some Arab governments - Egypt and Jordan, for instance - but not the Arab people. What they want, and what they have been told repeatedly they deserve, is a return of Palestinian refugees to what is now Israel and total control over all of Jerusalem. These are both out of the question as far as Israel is concerned. It is not willing to give up its capital and, in relatively short time, its Jewish majority.

This week, Palestinians and Israelis will once again talk peace in Washington. But until both sides, particularly the Arab peoples, give up on what they really want, the clock will remain where it has been. Those Pew polls show that's around 1947.

RICHARD COHEN writes for The Washington Post. cohenr@washpost.com.

Voila, we have a new American idol, a fresh icon to distract us from the drudgery of madness and remind us that humor is the best weapon against anger or angst.

For those who live in the alternate universe known as Planet Earth, where life is a process of tangible interactions and time is measured by the rotation of planets, the name Antoine Dodson may not ring a bell. A month ago, one might have been forgiven. Few beyond his Huntsville, Ala., housing project knew who he was.

Today, he is a phenom - the kind that can occur only in the world of Internet viruses and social media. Google produces more than 7 million links. YouTube offers a universe of musical remixes featuring everybody's New Favorite Person Ever.

At least for a while, to know Dodson is to love him.

His stratospheric rise to celebrity began when a man climbed into the bedroom window - and then the bed - of Dodson's 22-year-old sister, Kelly, and tried to assault her. When Dodson heard his sister scream, he ran to her room and wrestled her assailant, who managed to escape.

Next came the police, the cameras - and Dodson's now-famous performance.

Sometimes we don't know what we're made of until forced into action by circumstances. Tsunamis and hurricanes reveal heroes and expose monsters. A would-be rapist and a television crew bring out the beautiful and, yes, hilarious fury of a brother in the throes of his own Howard Beale moment.

Words can't do justice to Dodson's performance. You simply have to watch it. And then you have to watch the remix by the Gregory Brothers, famous for especially "auto-tuning" news clips.

In spite of the seriousness of the event, it is impossible to keep a straight face as Dodson rails against his sister's assailant, red bandana and passions ablaze:

"Obviously, we have a rapist in Lincoln Park. He's climbing in your windows, he's snatching your people up, trying to rape them; so y'all need to hide your kids, hide your wife and hide your husband, because they're raping everybody out here. ... We're looking for you. We gonna find you. I'm letting you know that. So you can run and tell that, homeboy!"

It's all in the delivery.

Nobody's laughing about what happened, least of all Dodson and his sister. But both admit to laughing - all the way to the bank - about what has transpired since. With the help of the Gregory Brothers and that indefinable something that causes a moment to become a movement, Dodson has taken a lemon and made a lemonade franchise.

Through Facebook, Twitter and a PayPal button, the proceeds from which he splits with the musicians, Dodson has made enough money to move his family out of the projects. So you can run and tell that, homeboy!

It's not a Horatio Alger story, whose rags-to-riches tales described how unlucky boys could achieve the American Dream of wealth and success through hard work, determination and courage. Dodson did display courage when he saved his sister from rape, but his moment on the stage was just that. A moment, random and uninvited.

Such is the new mechanism for the American Dream. Wealth and fame are valued over work and achievement. Social media have made 20-somethings into billionaires.

Dodson's fortunes, though modest by comparison, are nonetheless gratifying. We don't begrudge him his moment of fame because, among other things, he made us laugh. He also expressed a rage that most feel but don't express. Finally, on some level, we all recognize that luck has much to do with anyone's claiming the dream.

Dodson and his family weren't enjoying much luck when some idiot climbed through that window. The story of Antoine Dodson is a high-tech fairy tale where the bad guy is a joke; the brother who saves his sister is a hero and gets rich; and the Gregory Brothers are a merry band of musical pranksters.

Only in America.

The end.

KATHLEEN PARKER writes for The Washington Post. kathleenparker@washpost.com.

Remedies for these problems can at least be imagined. But America's tragic number - tragic because it is difficult to conceive remedial policies - is 70 percent. This is the portion of African-American children born to unmarried women. It may explain what puzzles Nathan Glazer.

Writing in The American Interest, Glazer, sociology professor emeritus at Harvard, considers it a "paradox" that the election of Barack Obama "coincided with the almost complete disappearance from American public life of discussion of the black condition and what public policy might do to improve it." This, says Glazer, is the black condition:

Employment prospects for young black men worsened even when the economy was robust. By the early 2000s, more than a third of all young black non-college men were incarcerated. More than 60 percent of black high school dropouts born since the mid-1960s go to prison. Mass incarceration blights the prospects of black women seeking husbands. So does another trend noted by sociologist William Julius Wilson: "In 2003-2004, for every 100 bachelor's degrees conferred on black men, 200 were conferred on black women."

Because changes in laws and mores have lowered barriers, the black middle class has been able to leave inner cities, which have become, Glazer says, "concentrations of the poor, the poorly educated, the unemployed and unemployable." High out-of-wedlock birth rates mean a constantly renewed cohort of adolescent males without male parenting, which means disorderly neighborhoods and schools. Glazer thinks it is possible that for some young black males, "acting white" - trying to excel in school - is considered "a betrayal of their group culture." This severely limits opportunities in an increasingly service economy where working with people matters more than working with things in manufacturing employment.

Now, from the Educational Testing Service, comes a report about "The Black-White Achievement Gap: When Progress Stopped," written by Paul E. Barton and Richard J. Coley. It examines the "startling" fact that most of the progress in closing the gap in reading and mathematics occurred in the 1970s and '80s. This means "progress generally halted for those born around the mid-1960s, a time when landmark legislative victories heralded an end to racial discrimination."

Only 35 percent of black children live with two parents, which partly explains why, while only 24 percent of white eighth-graders watch four or more hours of television on an average day, 59 percent of their black peers do. (Privileged children waste their time on new social media and other very mixed blessings of computers and fancy phones.)

Black children also are disproportionately handicapped by this class-based disparity: By age 4, the average child in a professional family hears about 20 million more words than the average child in a working-class family and about 35 million more than the average child in a welfare family - a child often alone with a mother who is a high school dropout.

After surveying much research concerning many possible explanations of why progress stopped, particularly in neighborhoods characterized by a "concentration of deprivation," the ETS report says:

"It is very hard to imagine progress resuming in reducing the education attainment and achievement gap without turning these family trends around - i.e., increasing marriage rates, and getting fathers back into the business of nurturing children." And: "It is similarly difficult to envision direct policy levers" to effect that.

So, two final numbers: Two decades, five factors. Two decades have passed since Barton wrote "America's Smallest School: The Family." He has estimated that about 90 percent of the difference in schools' proficiencies can be explained by five factors: the number of days students are absent from school, the number of hours students spend watching television, the number of pages read for homework, the quantity and quality of reading material in the students' homes - and, much the most important, the presence of two parents in the home. Public policies can have little purchase on these five, and least of all on the fifth.

GEORGE WILL writes for The Washington Post. georgewill@washpost.com.

That's a polite way of saying: clinging to bigotry. And promiscuous charges of bigotry are precisely how our current rulers and their vast media auxiliary react to an obstreperous citizenry that insists on incorrect thinking.

n Resistance to the vast expansion of government power, intrusiveness and debt, as represented by the tea party movement? Why, racist resentment toward a black president.

n Disgust with the federal government's unwillingness to curb illegal immigration, as crystallized in the Arizona law? Nativism.

n Opposition to the most radical redefinition of marriage in human history, as expressed in Proposition 8 in California? Homophobia.

n Opposition to a 15-story Islamic cultural center and mosque near ground zero? Islamophobia.

Now we know why the country has become "ungovernable," last year's excuse for the Democrats' failure of governance:

Who can possibly govern a nation of racist, nativist, homophobic Islamophobes?

Note what connects these issues. In every one, liberals have lost the argument in the court of public opinion. Majorities - often lopsided majorities - oppose President Obama's social-democratic agenda (e.g., the stimulus, Obamacare), support the Arizona law, oppose gay marriage and reject a ground zero mosque.

What's a liberal to do? Pull out the bigotry charge, the trump that pre-empts debate and gives no credit to the seriousness and substance of the contrary argument. The most venerable of these trumps is, of course, the race card. When the tea party arose, a spontaneous, leaderless and perfectly natural (and traditionally American) reaction to the vast expansion of government intrinsic to the president's proudly proclaimed transformational agenda, the liberal commentariat cast it as a mob of angry white yahoos disguising their antipathy to a black president by cleverly speaking in economic terms.

Then came Arizona and SB 1070. It seems impossible for the left to believe that people of good will could hold that: (a) illegal immigration should be illegal, (b) the federal government should not hold border enforcement hostage to comprehensive reform, i.e., amnesty, (c) every country has the right to determine the composition of its immigrant population.

As for Proposition 8, is it so hard to see why people might believe that a single judge overturning the will of 7 million voters is an affront to democracy? And that seeing merit in retaining the structure of the most ancient and fundamental of all social institutions is something other than an alleged hatred of gays - particularly since the opposite-gender requirement has characterized virtually every society in all the millennia until just a few years ago?

And now the ground zero mosque.

The intelligentsia is near unanimous that the only possible grounds for opposition is bigotry toward Muslims. This smug attribution of bigotry to two-thirds of the population hinges on the insistence on a complete lack of connection between Islam and radical Islam, a proposition that dovetails perfectly with the Obama administration's pretense that we are at war with nothing more than "violent extremists" of inscrutable motive and indiscernible belief. Those who reject this as both ridiculous and politically correct (an admitted redundancy) are declared Islamophobes.

It is a measure of the corruption of liberal thought and the collapse of its self-confidence that, finding itself so widely repudiated, it resorts reflexively to the cheapest race-baiting (in a colorful variety of forms). Indeed, how can one reason with a nation of pitchfork-wielding mobs brimming with "antipathy toward people who aren't like them" -blacks, Hispanics, gays and Muslims - a nation that is, as Michelle Obama once put it succinctly, "just downright mean?"

The Democrats are going to get beaten in November. Not just because the economy is ailing. Not just because Obama overread his mandate in governing too far left.

But because a comeuppance is due the arrogant elites whose undisguised contempt for the great unwashed prevents them from conceding serious thought to those who dare oppose them.

CHARLES KRAUTHAMMER writes for The Washington Post.

A profound change, however, is this: Talk about the crisis between Israel and "the Arab world" is anachronistic. Israel has treaties with two Arab nations, Egypt and Jordan, and Israel's most lethal enemy is Iran, which is not an Arab state. It and another non-Arab nation, Turkey, are eclipsing the Arab world, where 60 percent of the population of 300 million is under 25, and 26 percent of that cohort is unemployed. The prerequisites for Arab progress - freedom, education and the emancipation of women - are not contemplated.

Syria's Bashar al-Assad, a dictator buttressed by torture, recently called Israel a state "based on crime, slaughter." Imagine what Israelis thought when, at about the time Assad was saying this, a State Department ninny visiting Syria was tweeting to the world, "I'm not kidding when I say I just had the greatest frappacino (sic) ever."

Israel has changed what it can, its own near neighborhood. Since 1967, faced with unrelenting Palestinian irredentism, Israel has been weaving the West Bank into a common fabric with the coastal plain, the nation's economic and population center of gravity. Withdrawal from the West Bank would bring Tel Aviv's Ben-Gurion Airport within range of short-range rockets fired by persons overlooking the runways. So, the feasibility of such a withdrawal depends on how much has changed since 1974, when Yasser Arafat received a standing ovation at the U.N. when he said Israel has no right to exist.

Thirty-six years later, Israelis can watch West Bank Palestinian television incessantly inculcating anti-Semitism and denial of Israel's right to exist. Across the fence that has substantially reduced terrorism from the West Bank, Israelis see Ramallah, where Mahmoud Abbas, head of the Palestinian Authority, lives and where a square was recently named in honor of Dalal Mughrabi. In 1978, she, together with 11 other terrorists, hijacked an Israeli bus and massacred 37 Israelis and one American. Cigarette lighters sold on the West Bank show, when lit, the World Trade Center burning.

The Obama administration, which seems to consider itself too talented to bother with anything but "comprehensive" solutions to problems, may yet make matters worse by presenting its own plan for a final settlement of the Israeli-Palestinian problem. Barack Obama insists that it is "costing us significantly in terms of both blood and treasure," although he does not say how. Gen. David Petraeus says Israeli-Palestinian tensions "have an enormous effect on the strategic context." As though, were the tensions to subside, the hard men managing Iran's decades-long drive for nuclear weapons would then say, "Oh, well, in that case, let's call the whole thing off."

The biggest threat to peace might be the peace process -or, more precisely, the illusion that there is one. The mirage becomes the reason for maintaining its imaginary "momentum" by extorting concessions from Israel, the only party susceptible to U.S. pressure. Israel is, however, decreasingly susceptible. In one month, history will recycle when the partial 10-month moratorium on Israeli construction on the West Bank expires. Resumption of construction - even here, in the capital, which was not included in the moratorium - will be denounced by a fiction, "the international community," as a threat to another fiction, "the peace process."

This, even though no Israeli government of any political hue has ever endorsed a ban on construction in Jewish neighborhoods of East Jerusalem, where about 40 percent of the capital's Jewish population lives. Strategic Affairs Minister Moshe Yaalon, who says "the War of Independence has not ended" 62 years after 1948, says of an extension of the moratorium: "The prime minister is opposed to it. He said that clearly. The decision was for 10 months. (On) Sept. 27, we are immediately going to return" to construction and "Jerusalem is outside the discussion."

Predictably, Palestinian officials are demanding that the moratorium be extended as the price of their willingness to continue direct talks with Israel - which begin Sept. 2 - beyond Sept. 27. If this demand succeeds, history will remain cyclical: The "peace process" will be sustained by rewarding the Palestinian tactic of making the mere fact of negotiations contingent on Israeli concessions concerning matters that should be settled by negotiations.

GEORGE WILL writes for The Washington Post. georgewill@washpost.com.

This is not a complicated matter. If you believe that an entire religion of upward of a billion followers attacked the United States on Sept. 11, 2001, then it is understandable that locating a mosque near the fallen World Trade Center might be upsetting. But the facts are otherwise. Islam was not in on the attack - just a sliver of believers. That being the case, those people with legitimate hurt feelings are mistaken. They need our understanding, not our indulgence.

If, on the other hand, you do not believe that the attack was launched by an entire religion, then you have a moral duty to support the creation of the Islamic center. Lots of people fall into this category - or say they do - and still protest the mosque. They include Newt Gingrich, New York Republican gubernatorial candidate Rick Lazio and that Twittering Twit of the Tundra, Sarah Palin. They indulge in a kind of pornography of analogy - a bit of demagogic buffoonery that is becoming more and more obvious. They pretend that they have a solemn obligation to defend the (powerful) majority from the demands of the (powerless) minority and champion people whose emotions are based on a misreading of the facts.

Those of us who are of a certain age remember the days when African-Americans and their champions were being cautioned to go slow, compromise. They were being told to take into consideration the tender feelings of whites, no matter how ugly their racism, and protect their dewy Scarlett O'Hara way of life. Leading politicians espoused this course, President Eisenhower among them. Wrong was somehow to become a little less so, but right would be painfully postponed. What was compromise? The middle of the bus?

From that era I exhume a term: moral suasion. Repeatedly, civil rights activists urged Eisenhower to use the bully pulpit to guide the country on a moral course, to set an example. For the longest time, Ike refused to budge. The hero of Normandy somehow forgot how to lead until Arkansas Gov. Orval Faubus forced the president to literally call out the troops. The era remains a huge blot on Eisenhower's otherwise exemplary record.

Now something similar is happening. It's not merely that unscrupulous politicians are demagoguing the mosque issue, it is also that most others have kept their mouths shut. The Washington Post suggested that Bush, who has always shown great leadership on interfaith issues, speak out. Hughes, who argued the case for the mosque and then advocated building it elsewhere, should have followed her own logic. And the archbishop, instead of urging compromise, should have urged his congregants to show tolerance. He's not a labor mediator. He's a moral leader.

Over the years, thousands of priests have abused many thousands of children. This is a lamentable fact. Yet no rational person can possibly believe that all priests are pedophiles and that a plan to erect a church should or could be opposed by victims of priestly pedophilia. We know the difference between the acts of individuals - even many of them - and the dogma or beliefs of an entire religion. I am a Jew, but do not judge me by Baruch Goldstein, who in 1994 murdered 29 Muslims in Hebron.

Appearing on ABC's "This Week with Christiane Amanpour," Daisy Khan, a founder of the mosque (and the wife of the imam), rejected any compromise. She was right to do so because to compromise is to accede, even a bit, to the arguments of bigots, demagogues or the merely uninformed. This is no longer her fight. The fight is now all of ours.

It has become something of a cliche, I know, but no one ever put this sort of thing better than William Butler Yeats in his poem "The Second Coming." "The best lack all conviction, while the worst are full of passionate intensity."

Some passionate intensity from the best is past due.

RICHARD COHEN writes for The Washington Post. cohenr@washpost.com.

The next day, at a remove of 800 miles, Obama explains that he was only talking about the legality of the thing and not the wisdom - upon which he does not make, and will not make, any judgment.

You're left looking like a fool because Obama has said nothing: No one disputes the right to build; the whole debate is about the propriety, the decency of doing so.

It takes no courage to bask in the applause of a Muslim audience as you promise to stand for their right to build a mosque, giving the impression that you endorse the idea. What takes courage is to then respectfully ask that audience to reflect upon the wisdom of the project, and to consider whether the imam's alleged goal of interfaith understanding might not be better achieved by accepting the New York governor's offer to find another site.

The liberal intelligentsia stepped in with gusto, penning dozens of pro-mosque articles characterized by a frenzied unanimity, little resort to argument and difficulty dealing with analogies.

The Atlantic's Michael Kinsley was typical in arguing that the only grounds for opposing the mosque are bigotry or demagoguery. Well what about Pope John Paul II's ordering the closing of the convent at Auschwitz? Surely there can be no one more innocent of that crime than those devout nuns.

How does Kinsley explain this order to pray - but not there? He simply asserts that the decision is something "I confess that I never did understand."

That's his Q.E.D.? Is he stumped or is he inviting us to choose between his moral authority and that of one of the towering moral figures of the 20th century?

At least Richard Cohen of The Washington Post tries to grapple with the issue of sanctity and sensitivity. The results, however, are not pretty. He concedes that putting up a Japanese cultural center at Pearl Harbor would be offensive, but then dismisses the analogy to Ground Zero because 9/11 was merely "a rogue act, committed by 20 or so crazed samurai."

Obtuseness of this magnitude can only be deliberate. These weren't crazies. They were methodical, focused, steel-nerved operatives.

They were the leading edge of a worldwide movement of radical Islamists with cells in every continent, financial and theological support, a massive media and propaganda arm, and with an archipelago of local sympathizers who protect and guard them.

Why is America fighting Predator wars in Pakistan and Yemen, surveilling thousands of conversations and financial transactions, and engaged in operations against radical Muslims - because of 19 crazies, all of whom died nine years ago?

Radical Islam is not a majority of Islam. But with its financiers, clerics, propagandists, trainers, leaders, operatives and sympathizers - according to a conservative estimate, it commands the allegiance of 7 percent of Muslims, i.e., over 80 million souls - it is a very powerful strain within Islam. It is the reason every airport in the West is an armed camp and every land is on alert.

Ground Zero is the site of the most lethal attack of that worldwide movement, which consists of Muslims, acts in the name of Islam and is embedded within the Islamic world. These are regrettable facts. And that is why putting up a monument to Islam in this place is provocative.

Just as the people of Japan today would not think of planting their flag at Pearl Harbor, despite the fact that no Japanese under 85 has any responsibility for that infamy, representatives of Islam - the overwhelming majority of whose adherents are equally innocent of the infamy committed on 9/11 in their name - should exercise comparable respect for what even Obama calls hallowed ground.

CHARLES KRAUTHAMMER writes for The Washington Post.

During Prime Minister Binyamin Netanyahu's July visit to Washington, Barack Obama praised him as "willing to take risks for peace." There was a time when that meant swapping "land for peace" - Israel sacrificing something tangible and irrecoverable, strategic depth, in exchange for something intangible and perishable, promises of diplomatic normality.

Strategic depth matters in a nation where almost everyone is a soldier, so society cannot function for long with the nation fully mobilized. Also, before the 1967 Six-Day War, Israel within the borders established by the 1949 armistice was in one place just nine miles wide, a fact that moved George W. Bush to say: In Texas we have driveways that long. Israel exchanged a lot of land to achieve a chilly peace with Egypt, yielding the Sinai, which is almost three times larger than Israel and was 89 percent of the land captured in the process of repelling the 1967 aggression.

The intifada was launched by the late Yasser Arafat -terrorist and Nobel Peace Prize winner - after the July 2000 Camp David meeting, during which then-Prime Minister Ehud Barak offered to cede control of all of Gaza and more than 90 percent of the West Bank, with small swaps of land to accommodate the growth of Jerusalem suburbs just across the 1949 armistice line.

Israelis are famously fractious, but the intifada produced among them a consensus that the most any government of theirs could offer without forfeiting domestic support is less than any Palestinian interlocutor would demand. Furthermore, the intifada was part of a pattern. As in 1936 and 1947, talk about partition prompted Arab violence.

In 1936, when the British administered Palestine, the Peel Commission concluded that there was "an irrepressible conflict" - a phrase coined by an American historian to describe the U.S. Civil War - "between two national communities within the narrow bounds of one small country." And: "Neither of the two national ideals permits" a combination "in the service of a single state." The commission recommended "a surgical operation" - partition. What followed was the Arab Revolt of 1936 to 1939.

On Nov. 29, 1947, the U.N. recommended a partition plan. Israel accepted the recommendation. On Nov. 30, Israel was attacked.

Palestine has a seemingly limitless capacity for eliciting nonsense from afar, as it did recently when Britain's Prime Minister David Cameron referred to Gaza as a "prison camp." In a sense it is, but not in the sense Cameron intended. His implication was that Israel is the cruel imprisoner. Gaza's actual misfortune is to be under the iron fist of Hamas, a terrorist organization.

In May, a flotilla launched from Turkey approached Gaza in order to provoke a confrontation with Israel, which, like Egypt, administers a blockade to prevent arms from reaching Hamas. The flotilla's pretense was humanitarian relief for Gaza - where the infant mortality rate is lower and life expectancy is higher than in Turkey.

Israelis less than 50 years old have no memory of their nation within the 1967 borders set by the 1949 armistice that ended the War of Independence. The rest of the world seems to have no memory at all concerning the intersecting histories of Palestine and the Jewish people.

The creation of Israel did not involve the destruction of a Palestinian state, there having been no such state since the Romans arrived. And if the Jewish percentage of the world's population were today what it was when the Romans ruled Palestine, there would be 200 million Jews. After a uniquely hazardous passage through two millennia without a homeland, there are 13 million Jews.

In the 62 years since this homeland was founded on one-sixth of 1 percent of the land of what is carelessly and inaccurately called "the Arab world," Israelis have never known an hour of real peace. Patronizing American lectures on the reality of risks and the desirableness of peace, which once were merely fatuous, are now obscene.

GEORGE WILL writes for The Washington Post. georgewill@washpost.com.

No more. "I was not commenting, and I will not comment, on the wisdom of making the decision to put a mosque there," Obama said in revising and extending and eviscerating his remarks of the previous night. He had merely been commenting on freedom of religion. Turns out he's for it.

The president muddled his message. Does he not grasp that questioning the "wisdom" of the mosque's placement is predicated on thinking that 9/11 was a Muslim crime? Does he not understand that the issue here is religious prejudice, not zoning? The answer, of course, is that he does. But unlike Henry Clay, he would rather be president than right.

The very ugly controversy over the planned Islamic center - not at Ground Zero, mind you, and not even within eyeshot - has managed to make fools or knaves out of some pretty smart people. Some of them have embarked on a fruitless hunt for the perfect analogy. The winner goes to that evil cherub Newt Gingrich, formerly of Georgia but now of any meeting hall with a spotlight. He said approving the mosque "would be like putting a Nazi sign next to the Holocaust museum."

Gingrich keeps trying. Earlier he had argued that since there are no churches or synagogues in Saudi Arabia, "there should be no mosque near Ground Zero." But the mosque is not Saudi Arabian, it is Islamic, a distinction not all that hard to keep in mind. The comparison to a Nazi sign at the Holocaust museum is equally specious. Every Nazi was dedicated to the persecution and/or murder of all Jews. This is not the case with Islam and the World Trade Center. That attack was conducted by a handful of fanatics, not an entire religion.

Others have joined in the false analogy contests. The most surprising is Charles Krauthammer, my longtime colleague on The Washington Post's op-ed page. In a belabored analogy, he said that while "no one objects to Japanese cultural centers, the idea of putting one up at Pearl Harbor would be offensive." Yes, indeed. But all of Japan attacked Pearl Harbor and declared war on the United States. It was not a rogue act, committed by 20 or so crazed samurai, but an attack by an entire nation. You can look that up.

Krauthammer, though, could not be stopped. He likened the mosque to a "commercial tower over Gettysburg," then to the attempt to establish a convent outside of Auschwitz and, inevitably, to "a German cultural center at, say, Treblinka." Enough said. We all have bad days.

If it is not false analogies that pollute this debate, it is false populism. The people are opposed. John Boehner, the House minority leader, says so, and so does Rep. Peter King, the Long Island Loud Mouth who is running for something. They are right - but so what? Would they have liked Lincoln to have deferred to popular sentiment in the South regarding slavery? Would they have liked Truman to have polled the Army about desegregation?

Minority rights are embedded in our Constitution. It was the perceived lack of them that caused the states to seek amendments, what we now call the Bill of Rights. King, Boehner and the rest of the GOP mob are showing a fearless willingness to pander to majority prejudice. Newt has mounted a crusade against radical Islam. No Saracen will be safe.

The inclination to go from the particular to the general - to blame a people for the acts of a few - always has fueled pogroms and race riots. History shows that it is a natural tendency and it will literally run riot if it is not controlled. It is the solemn obligation of elected leaders to restrain such an urge - to be moral as well as political leaders. Obama almost pulled that off, but he flinched.

Yes, he couldn't.

RICHARD COHEN writes for The Washington Post. cohenr@washpost.com.

A new study scheduled for release Monday about the value of a college education, at least when it comes to the basics, has found the opposite to be true in most cases. Forget Harvard and think Lamar.

Indeed, the Texas university, where tuition runs about $7,000 per year (compared to Harvard's $38,000) earns an "A" to Harvard's "D" based on an analysis of the universities' commitment to core subjects deemed essential to a well-rounded, competitive education.

In other words, Lamar requires courses that Harvard apparently considers of lesser value. These include six of the seven subject areas used in the study to gauge an institution's commitment to general education: composition, literature, foreign language at the intermediate level, U.S. government or history, economics, mathematics, and natural or physical science.

Harvard has comprehensive requirements for only two of these subjects - composition and science.

The study was conducted by the nonprofit American Council of Trustees and Alumni (ACTA) to help parents and students determine where they might get the best bang for their buck. It was timed for release to coincide with U.S. News and World Report's annual evaluation of the "best" colleges and universities, which is based primarily on various statistical data, as well as reputation and prestige.

ACTA focused its efforts on requirements as a measure of what an institution actually delivers. Anne Neal, ACTA president, is quick to point out that the grading system doesn't tell the whole story about an institution, but does offer a crucial part that has been missing.

On a user-friendly website, "What Will They Learn?" (www.whatwilltheylearn.com), visitors can compare the major public and private universities in all 50 states. Of the 714 four-year institutions reviewed, more than 60 percent received a "C" or worse for requiring three or fewer of the key subjects. Only 16 received an "A" grade, among them: Baylor University, City University of New York - Brooklyn College, Texas A&M University, the United States Air Force Academy, the United States Military Academy, the University of Arkansas and St. Thomas Aquinas.

In other findings, public institutions are doing a relatively better job than private schools of ensuring that students receive basic skills and knowledge - and at a considerably lower price. But both public and private universities are failing to ensure that students cover the important subjects, notably economics and U.S. government or history.

Among the reasons for this void in "the basics" is that many professors prefer research to teaching, and course content often reflects that. There's no paucity of subjects to choose from, which is part of the problem. More courses equals more expense equals higher tuition. The question is whether the offerings are of any value.

At Emory University, for example, to fulfill a "History, Society and Culture" requirement, students may choose from about 600 courses, including "Gynecology in the Ancient World." At the University of Wisconsin at Madison, a "Humanities, Literature and Arts" requirement may be met by taking an introduction to television. Neal, herself a graduate of Harvard College and Harvard Law School, doesn't dispute that these may be excellent classes. "But the question being asked is whether this is the only exposure a student is getting when going to university."

Students given so many choices aren't likely to select what's good for them. Given human nature, they'll choose what's fun, easy or cool - and not early in the morning and not on Fridays. It's up to universities to guide them away from the dessert tray to the vegetable courses they need to develop healthy minds. Neal says that colleges have abdicated that responsibility.

"It's ludicrous to take an 18-year-old and give them hundreds of choices when they don't have any basis for making a decision."

At a time when the cost of higher education is increasingly prohibitive - and emphasis tends to focus on status - students and parents can find solace in the possibility that a better education can be found in one's own backyard. This doesn't necessarily mean that a student at Lamar will learn more than one at Harvard. As some argue, intellectually motivated students indeed may find what they need anywhere. And students properly guided may fail to absorb what is offered.

But the study and website do fill a gap so that parents and students can make better choices. As a consequence, colleges and universities may be forced to examine their own responsibility in molding an educated, well-informed citizenry.

KATHLEEN PARKER is a syndicated columnist. E-mail: kathleenparker@washpost.com.

To understand the man who will make it, begin with Prime Minister Binyamin Netanyahu's belief that stopping Iran's nuclear weapons program is integral to stopping the worldwide campaign to reverse 1948. It is, he says, a campaign to "put the Jew back to the status of a being that couldn't defend himself - a perfect victim."

Today's Middle East, he says, reflects two developments. One is the rise of Iran and militant Islam since the 1979 revolution, which led to al-Qaida, Hamas and Hezbollah. The other development is the multiplying threat of missile warfare.

Now Israel faces a third threat, the campaign to delegitimize it in order to extinguish its capacity for self-defense. After two uniquely perilous millennia for Jews, the creation of Israel meant, Netanyahu says, "the capacity for self-defense restored to the Jewish people." But note, he says, the reflexive worldwide chorus of condemnation when Israel responded with force to rocket barrages from Gaza and from southern Lebanon. There is, he believes, a crystallizing consensus that "Israel is not allowed to exercise self-defense."

From 1948 through 1973, he says, enemies tried to "eliminate Israel by conventional warfare." Having failed, they tried to demoralize and paralyze Israel with suicide bombers and other terrorism. "We put up a fence," Netanyahu says. "Now they have rockets that go over the fence." Israel's military, which has stressed offense as a solution to the nation's lack of strategic depth, now stresses missile defense.

That, however, cannot cope with Hamas' tens of thousands of rockets in Gaza and Hezbollah's 60,000 in southern Lebanon. There, U.N. resolution 1701, promulgated after the 2006 war, has been predictably farcical. This was supposed to inhibit the arming of Hezbollah and prevent its operations south of the Litani River. Since 2006, Hezbollah's rocket arsenal has tripled and its operations mock resolution 1701. Hezbollah, learning from Hamas, now places rockets near schools and hospitals, certain that Israel's next response to indiscriminate aggression will turn the world media into a force multiplier for the aggressors.

Any Israeli self-defense anywhere is automatically judged "disproportionate." Israel knows this as it watches Iran.

Last year was Barack Obama's wasted year of "engaging" Iran. This led to sanctions that are unlikely to ever become sufficiently potent. With Russia, China and Turkey being uncooperative, Iran is hardly "isolated." The Iranian democracy movement probably cannot quickly achieve regime change. It took Solidarity 10 years to do so against a Polish regime less brutally repressive than Iran's.

Hillary Clinton's words about extending a "defense umbrella over the region" imply, to Israelis, fatalism about a nuclear Iran. As for deterrence working against a nuclear-armed regime steeped in an ideology of martyrdom, remember: In 1980, Ayatollah Khomeini said:

"We do not worship Iran, we worship Allah. For patriotism is another name for paganism. I say let this land burn. I say let this land go up in smoke, provided Islam emerges triumphant in the rest of the world."

You say, that was long ago? Israel says, this is now:

Iran's supreme leader, Ali Khamenei, says Israel is the "enemy of God." Tehran, proclaiming that the Holocaust never happened and vowing to complete it, sent an ambassador to Poland who in 2006 wanted to measure the ovens at Auschwitz to prove them inadequate for genocide. Iran's former president, Hashemi Rafsanjani, who is considered a "moderate" by people for whom believing is seeing, calls Israel a "one-bomb country."

If Iran were to "wipe the Zionist entity off the map," as it vows to do, it would, Netanyahu believes, achieve a regional "dominance not seen since Alexander." Netanyahu does not say Israel will, if necessary, act alone to prevent this. Or does he?

He says CIA Director Leon Panetta is "about right" in saying Iran can be a nuclear power in two years. He says 1948 meant this: "For the first time in 2,000 years, a sovereign Jewish people could defend itself against attack." And he says: "The tragic history of the powerlessness of our people explains why the Jewish people need a sovereign power of self-defense." If Israel strikes Iran, the world will not be able to say it was not warned.

GEORGE WILL writes for The Washington Post. E-mail: georgewill@washpost.com.

When we speak of Ground Zero as hallowed ground, what we mean is that it belongs to those who suffered and died there - and that such ownership obliges us, the living, to preserve the dignity and memory of the place, never allowing it to be forgotten, trivialized or misappropriated.

That's why Disney's early '90s proposal to build an American history theme park near Manassas Battlefield was defeated by a broad coalition fearing vulgarization of the Civil War (and wiser than me; at the time I obtusely saw little harm in the venture). It's why the commercial viewing tower built right on the border of Gettysburg was taken down by the National Park Service. It's why while no one objects to Japanese cultural centers, the idea of putting one up at Pearl Harbor would be offensive.

And why Pope John Paul II ordered the Carmelite nuns to leave the convent they had established at Auschwitz. He was in no way devaluing their heartfelt mission to pray for the souls of the dead. He was teaching them a lesson in respect: This is not your place, it belongs to others. However pure your voice, better to let silence reign.

Even New York Mayor Michael Bloomberg, who denounced opponents of the proposed 15-story mosque and Islamic center near Ground Zero as tramplers on religious freedom, asked the mosque organizers "to show some special sensitivity to the situation."

Yet, as columnist Rich Lowry pointedly noted, the government has no business telling churches how to conduct their business, shape their message, or show "special sensitivity" to anyone about anything. Bloomberg was thereby inadvertently conceding the claim of those he excoriates for opposing the mosque, namely, that Ground Zero is indeed unlike any other place and therefore unique criteria govern what can be done there.

Bloomberg's implication is clear: If the proposed mosque were controlled by "insensitive" Islamist radicals either excusing or celebrating 9/11, he would not support its construction.

But then, why not? By the mayor's own expansive view of religious freedom, by what right do we dictate the message of any mosque?

Moreover, as a practical matter, there's no guarantee this couldn't happen in the future. Religious institutions in this country are autonomous. Who is to say that the mosque won't one day hire an Anwar al-Aulaqi - spiritual mentor to the Fort Hood shooter and the Christmas Day bomber, and one-time imam at the Virginia mosque attended by two of the 9/11 terrorists?

An Aulaqi preaching in Virginia is a security problem. An Aulaqi preaching at Ground Zero is a sacrilege.

Location matters. Especially this location. Ground Zero is the site of the greatest mass murder in American history - perpetrated by Muslims of a particular Islamist orthodoxy in whose cause they died and in whose name they killed.

Of course that strain represents only a minority of Muslims. Islam is no more intrinsically Islamist than present-day Germany is Nazi - yet despite contemporary Germany's innocence, no German of good will would even think of proposing a German cultural center at, say, Treblinka.

Which makes you wonder about the good will behind Imam Feisal Abdul Rauf's proposal. This is a man who has called U.S. policy "an accessory to the crime" of 9/11 and, when recently asked whether Hamas is a terrorist organization, replied, "I'm not a politician. ... The issue of terrorism is a very complex question."

America is a free country where you can build whatever you want - but not anywhere. That's why we have zoning laws. No liquor store near a school, no strip malls where they offend local sensibilities, and, if your house doesn't meet community architectural codes, you cannot build at all.

These restrictions are for reasons of aesthetics. Others are for more profound reasons of common decency and respect for the sacred. No commercial tower over Gettysburg, no convent at Auschwitz - and no mosque at Ground Zero.

Build it anywhere but there.

The governor of New York offered to help find land to build the mosque elsewhere. A mosque really seeking to build bridges, Rauf's ostensible hope for the structure, would accept the offer. It was refused.

CHARLES KRAUTHAMMER writes for The Washington Post.

Qutb was hanged in 1966 by the Egyptian government of Gamal Abdel Nasser after the customary torture. He had been the intellectual leader of the outlawed Muslim Brotherhood and a man of copious literary output. One of his efforts was called "Our Struggle with the Jews." It is a work of unabashed, breathtakingly stupid anti-Semitism, one of the reasons The New York Review of Books recently characterized Qutb's views "as extreme as Hitler's." About all this, The Economist is oddly, ominously and unforgivably silent.

This is both puzzling and troublesome. After all, it's not as if Qutb was some minor figure. He is, as the sub-head on The Economist review says, "the father of Islamic fundamentalism," and it is impossible to read anything about him that does not attest to his immense contemporary importance. Nor was Qutb's anti-Semitism some sort of juvenile madness, expressed in the hormonal certainty of youth and later recanted as both certainty and hairline receded. It was, instead, the creation of his middle age and was published in the early 1950s. In other words, his essay is a post-Holocaust work, written in full knowledge of what anti-Semitism had just accomplished. The mass murder of Europe's Jews didn't give him the slightest pause. Qutb was undaunted.

But so, apparently, are some others who write about him. In his recent and well-received book, "The Arabs," Eugene Rogan of Oxford University gives Qutb his due "as one of the most influential Islamic reformers of the (20th) century" but does not mention his anti-Semitism or, for that matter, his raging hatred of America. Like the 9/11 terrorists, Qutb spent some time in America - Greeley, Colo., Washington, D.C., and Palo Alto, Calif. -learning to loathe Americans. He was particularly revolted by its overly sexualized women. Imagine if he had been to New York!

The Economist's review is stunning in its omission. Can it be that a mere 65 years after the fires of Auschwitz were banked, anti-Semitism has been relegated to a trivial, personal matter, like a preference for blondes -something not worth mentioning?

Yet, Qutb is not like Richard Wagner, whose anti-Semitism was repellent but did not in the least affect his music. Qutb's Jew-hatred is not incidental to his work. While not quite central, it has nevertheless proved important, having been adopted along with his other ideas by Hamas. Qutb blames Jews for almost everything: "atheistic materialism," "animalistic sexuality," "the destruction of the family" and, of course, an incessant war against Islam itself.

Obviously, this is no minor matter. Critics of Israel frequently accuse it of racism in its treatment of Palestinians. Sometimes, the charge is apt. But there is nothing in the Israeli media or popular culture that even approaches what is openly, and with official sanction, said in the Arab world about Jews. The message is an echo of Nazi racism, and the prescription, stated or merely implied, is the same.

The Economist and Rogan are insufficient in themselves to comprise a movement. Yet I cannot quite suppress the feeling that the need to demonize Israel is so great that the immense moral failings of some of its enemies have to be swept under the carpet. As Jacob Weisberg pointed out recently in Slate, the "boycott Israel" movement is oddly unbalanced -so much fury directed at Israel, so little at countries like China or Venezuela. Can it be that the French philosopher Vladimir Jankelevitch was prescient when he suggested years ago that anti-Zionism "gives us the permission and even the right and even the duty to be anti-Semitic in the name of democracy?" The line between anti-Zionism and anti-Semitism, a demarcation I have always acknowledged, is becoming increasingly blurred.

Because The Economist's book reviews are unsigned, it's impossible to know - and The Economist would not say - who's at fault here. So the magazine itself is accountable not just for bad taste or unfathomable ignorance, but for disregarding its own vow, published on its first page, "to take part in 'a severe contest between intelligence ... and an unworthy timid ignorance obstructing our progress.'" During the week of July 15, it didn't just lose the contest - it never even showed up for it.

RICHARD COHEN writes for The Washington Post. cohenr@washpost.com.

Most disturbing was the stated rationale. This was being proposed "in the absence of Comprehensive Immigration Reform." In other words, because Congress refuses to do what these bureaucrats would like to see done, they will legislate it themselves.

Regardless of your feelings on the substance of the immigration issue, this is not how a constitutional democracy should operate. Administrators administer the law, they don't change it. That's the legislators' job.

When questioned, the White House downplayed the toxic memo, leaving the impression that it was nothing more than ruminations emanating from the bowels of Homeland Security. But the administration is engaged in an even more significant power play elsewhere.

A 2007 Supreme Court ruling gave the Environmental Protection Agency the authority to regulate carbon emissions if it could demonstrate that they threaten human health and the environment. The Obama EPA made precisely that finding, thereby granting itself a huge expansion of power and, noted The Washington Post, sending "a message to Congress."

It was not a subtle message: Enact cap-and-trade - taxing and heavily regulating carbon-based energy - or the EPA will do so unilaterally. As Frank O'Donnell of Clean Air Watch noted, such a finding "is likely to help light a fire under Congress to get moving."

Well, Congress didn't. Despite the "regulatory cudgel" (to again quote the Post) the administration has been waving, the Senate has refused to acquiesce.

Good for the Senate. But what to do when the executive is passively aggressive rather than actively so? Take border security. Sen. Jon Kyl, R-Ariz., reports that President Obama told him about pressure from his political left and its concern that if the border is secured, Republicans will have no incentive to support comprehensive reform (i.e., amnesty). Indeed, Homeland Security's abandonment of the "virtual fence" on the southern border, combined with its lack of interest in completing the real fence that today covers only one-third of the border, gives the distinct impression that serious border enforcement is not a high administration priority absent some Republican quid pro quo on comprehensive reform.

But border enforcement is not something to be manipulated in return for legislative favors. It is, as the administration vociferously argued in court in the Arizona case, the federal executive's constitutional responsibility. Its job is to faithfully execute the laws. Non-execution is a dereliction of duty.

This contagion of executive willfulness is not confined to the federal government or to Democrats. In Virginia, the Republican attorney general has just issued a ruling allowing police to ask about one's immigration status when stopped for some other reason (e.g., a traffic violation). Heretofore, police could inquire only upon arrest and imprisonment.

Whatever your views about the result, the process is suspect. If police latitude regarding the interrogation of possible illegal immigrants is to be expanded, that's an issue for the legislature, not the executive.

How did we get here? I blame Henry Paulson. (Such a versatile sentence.) The gold standard of executive overreach was achieved the day he summoned the heads of the country's nine largest banks and informed them that henceforth the federal government was their business partner. The banks were under no legal obligation to obey. But they know the capacity of the federal government, when crossed, to cause you trouble, endless trouble. They complied.

So did BP when the president summoned its top executives to the White House to demand a $20 billion federally administered escrow fund for damages. Existing law capped damages at $75 million. BP, like the banks, understood the power of the U.S. government. Twenty billion it was.

Again, you can be pleased with the result (I was), and still be troubled by how we got there. Everyone wants energy in the executive (as Alexander Hamilton called it). But not lawlessness. In the modern welfare state, government has the power to regulate your life. That's bad enough. But at least there is one restraint on this bloated power: the separation of powers. Such constraints on your life must first be approved by both houses of Congress.

That's called the consent of the governed. The constitutional order is meant to subject you to the will of the people's representatives, not to the whim of a chief executive or the imagination of a loophole-seeking bureaucrat.

CHARLES KRAUTHAMMER writes for The Washington Post.

Vacillating politicians vacillate. Thin-skinned politicians explode.

Democrats are now feeling enormous political stress. Independents have fled the Obama coalition, largely out of concern about debt.

Intensity is all on the Republican side. A recent Gallup poll found that the percentage of Republican voters who say they are "very enthusiastic" to vote in 2010 is twice the percentage of Democrats who say the same (44 percent to 22 percent).

President Obama's approval flirts with 40 percent.

On this trajectory, Democrats see the House slipping away, their Senate majority threatened, and a president now too divisive to profitably appear in many districts.

So how have national Democrats decided to respond? With tactics that make their worst problems worse.

First is the depiction of Republicans as the "party of no," populated by obstructionists.

Vice President Joe Biden applied this critique to the stimulus. "There's a lot of people at the time argued it was too small," he said. If it had not been for Republican opposition, "I think it would have been bigger." No doubt it would have been.

This is Biden's response to economic anxiety: If Democrats had even greater control - even larger influence than holding the presidency and Congress - they would have spent more than $862 billion on the stimulus. Rather than allying the fiscal concerns of independents, Biden is actively feeding these fears - thereby making the case for the moderating effects of divided government.

With health reform and massive spending, Democrats have picked a fight on the size and role of government. The Republican response, at this point, consists mainly of yelling "Stop!" In a presidential race - which demands a positive domestic agenda - this would not be sufficient. In a midterm referendum on the performance of the president and Congress, it seems like more than enough.

A second tactic has been to identify Republicans with tea party extremism, the way Democrats once tried to identify Republicans with the religious right. As in that earlier case, there are extremes that deserve criticism. But about a quarter to a third of Americans identify in one way or another with the tea party movement. As William Galston of The Brookings Institution points out, Americans place themselves on the ideological spectrum closer to the tea party movement than they do to the Democratic Party, which they view as increasingly liberal.

Crude Democratic attacks on the tea party offend a broad group of voters. And the political intensity of conservative populists is only increased by elite disdain.

The third response to declining Democratic fortunes is to blame George W. Bush - Obama's currently favored tactic. This week, Obama ripped Bush for the economic problems of the country and tried to swipe credit for the successes of Bush's Iraq strategy (a strategy that Obama opposed).

The problem is the contrast. Most would concede that former President Bush has been tremendously classy since leaving office, not only refusing to take the bait of criticism but agreeing to help with the effort in Haiti when Obama asked. Of Obama's behavior, "classy" is not the adjective that comes to mind. Instead, Obama's self-serving criticism seems small, petty and shirking. In a nation increasingly skeptical of the president's leadership style, Obama is adding to those concerns.

Blaming Bush becomes less credible over time. After 18 months dominating every elected branch of government and fulfilling many of their wishes, Democrats seemed surprised by the arrival of accountability. On the economy, investors and job creators don't make decisions based on blame; they make decisions based on confidence in current policies. Right now, they see endless deficits and likely tax increases. And they have little reason for confidence.

It seldom works in politics to respond to a coming political wave with marginal changes in political tactics. Parties generally don't shift their policies or moderate their ideology until after they are well and truly walloped by voters. But Democrats under stress are actually complicating their own task - further alienating independents, provoking conservative intensity, practicing an unattractive pettiness, and making a walloping in November more likely.

MICHAEL GERSON writes for The Washington Post. michaelgerson@washpost.com. GEORGE WILL is on vacation.